Off the Record

Off the Record is a macOS app built by Weird Machines that blocks AI from transcribing your meetings. It reshapes your voice in real time, so the people on the call hear and understand you exactly as usual, while AI notetakers, meeting bots and hidden interview copilots get nothing usable to work with. The product is for anyone who spends their day on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or any other application that uses a microphone, and who wants to decide for themselves when AI is allowed to hear them. Rather than asking other people's notetakers to behave, Off the Record changes the audio itself before it ever leaves your machine, and it does that work entirely on your own device. You stay on the record when you want to be, and off it when you don't. AI notetakers have become a normal part of online meetings, and, as the site acknowledges, they are often useful. The problem is that not every notetaker announces itself. Some run quietly on the other person's computer, with no bot ever joining the call and no notice to anyone on the invite. They do not simply transcribe either; they pick out what was said between the two of you and send it to everyone on the invite. Interviewing has its own version of the same problem: AI copilots hide on candidates' screens, listen to your questions and write polished answers in seconds, which makes it hard to know whether an answer is really the candidate's. As the site puts it, you cannot say no to what you cannot see. Off the Record gives that choice back, letting you keep the lock off when you are happy to be transcribed and turn it on when you are not. The core capability is real-time voice reshaping. A small model running on your Mac alters your voice as you speak, adding small amounts of noise at strategic points that are aimed at speech-to-text systems rather than human ears. The result is that colleagues and friends hear you normally, though they may sometimes notice a slight change, and the site recommends headphones for the best results. Off the Record is honest that the effect is subtle rather than invisible: people still understand every word, live or in a recording. What changes is what a machine can do with the audio afterwards. A demo on the site plays a clip twice, first as original audio and then off the record, so visitors can hear the difference for themselves. Compatibility is deliberately broad. Off the Record works with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and with any app that uses your microphone, with no per-app setup required. The site backs the claim with unedited output from four widely used speech-to-text engines, including one running live, with names withheld. Across the engines, the protected audio produces nonsense, garbled phrases and, in one live case, no text returned at all, while the intended sentence is simply that the people on this call can understand everything the speaker says, and the robots cannot. Visitors can download a protected sample audio file and run it through any transcriber of their choosing. Voice processing stays on your Mac. Everything happens on your device, and your voice is never sent to Weird Machines or to any cloud service, which the company frames as both a privacy and an ownership point: it stays private, and it stays yours. A menu bar app shows a lock and a processing-on-this-device indicator; clicking the lock takes you off the record. For hiring, Off the Record protects the interviewer's side of a conversation, so a candidate's hidden copilot hears nonsense while the candidate hears the questions as usual. The same protection is being extended beyond meetings with the Off the Record Stick, a device available for pre-order at $59.99 that brings protection to phone calls, since regular calls are not end-to-end encrypted. The Stick works with any phone you can pair a Bluetooth headset with, iPhone or Android, protects calls 100% on your device as you speak, and turns on or off with one click. The approach is different from asking platforms or notetakers to respect a setting. Off the Record does not fight AI notetakers directly; it changes the signal they receive. Your voice is reshaped before it leaves your Mac, which means the protection travels with the audio: because the reshaping happens at the source, a recording carries the same protection, and transcribing it later still gets nothing usable. That answers the obvious question of whether someone could simply listen to the recording. Yes, they can, and that is the point. Humans hear you as usual, live or recorded. What Off the Record stops is AI. Getting started reflects the same simplicity: download it for macOS, open it from the menu bar and click the lock. The benefits follow from that design. You keep speaking normally and being understood, without changing how you present yourself on calls. You gain a way to say no to transcription that you cannot see, including notetakers running silently on someone else's computer and copilots listening in to feed answers. Your voice never leaves your device, so the tool does not create a new copy of your speech in the cloud. Because processing is local, the protection applies both to what is said live and to any recording of it. And because it sits at the microphone level, it covers every app you already use rather than requiring you to switch tools or configure each meeting platform separately. Concrete scenarios are described throughout the site. In an ordinary online meeting, you speak as usual while AI notetakers and meeting bots that transcribe calls get nothing worth sharing with everyone on the invite. In a hiring interview, the interviewer turns protection on so that a hidden interview copilot on the candidate's screen hears nonsense instead of the questions, and every answer is genuinely the candidate's own. On a personal or business phone call, the Off the Record Stick is designed to bring the same protection to calls that are not end-to-end encrypted. Should you want the notetaker to work normally, you simply leave the lock off and stay on the record. The site also positions the tool for company-wide rollouts through its Organization plan. Off the Record is priced in tiers. The Free plan costs $0, needs no account, and gives you 60 protected minutes a week that reset every Monday, with your voice staying on your Mac; the site describes it as a way to try the product on real calls. Pro is $8 per month, or $72 a year, saving 25%, and removes the limits: unlimited protected minutes, up to five Macs, and email sign-in with no password. Hiring is $30 per seat per month, billed yearly at $360 per seat, and gives Pro to every interviewer, lets a team invite members by email and add or remove seats at any time. Organization is custom priced for a team's size, includes everything in Pro for everyone, sets up seats for you, and offers custom terms and invoicing. Prices are in USD, tax may apply at checkout, and you can upgrade anytime from the app. The target users are people in meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or any mic-based app, interviewers and hiring teams, and organizations rolling the tool out company-wide. Off the Record is, in Weird Machines' words, the company's first machine, not its last, and it targets a narrow, specific job: choosing when AI hears you. It does not pretend to make you invisible to humans, and it does not ask other people's tools to cooperate. It reshapes your voice in real time on your own Mac so that the people you are talking to understand you as usual while speech-to-text gets nothing usable, whether live or from a recording later. With a free tier to test it on real calls, paid plans that lift the limits, an interview-focused plan and a phone-call Stick on the way, it gives control back to the person speaking.